Philippine labour sheriff lays down the law

Don’t let the mile-wide smile and the easy charm fool you — there’s a new sheriff in town, and he means to set a few things straight.

Forty years after opening its first Philippine Overseas Labour Office in Canada, Manila has at last installed its second labour attache in a country that boasts — conservatively — some 800,000 Filipinos, with nearly 90,000 officially residing in British Columbia.

"I’m here, my office is here and there are rules now," says Vancouver-based Bernardino Julve, Western Canada’s new Philippine Consular Officer-In-Charge of Labour, the man the community has already dubbed the "guardian angel" of Filipino workers.

"Given the reports I’ve read, there are some concerns about the situation here in B.C.," adds Julve, a lawyer-turned-career diplomatic, who arrived in Vancouver following similar assignments in Rome and Hong Kong.

With the ink still drying on B.C.’s own memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Philippine government, Julve is here to oversee the implementation of a series of labour agreements between Canada’s western provinces and The Philippines.

The freshly-minted MOUs, designed, says Julve, "for an increased, systematic, orderly and ethical import of our workers to Canada," are now in effect in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and B.C., with Alberta — home to 79 per cent of last year’s Filipino influx in Canada — expected to come on line with its agreement in the coming weeks.

The agreements provide for the recognition and enforcement in Canada of Philippine regulations that have been on Manila’s books since 2006, regulations that stipulate employer responsibilities in contractual agreements with imported Filipino workers. (See: Sidebar)

While the two-year, B.C.-Philippine memorandum of understanding was drafted to speed-fill the provincial labour shortage with skilled workers from The Philippines, Julve’s work in his new POLO office at the Philppine Consulate General in Vancouver involves the welfare of workers, just as much as it does the affairs of state.

Perhaps more so — Bernie Julve is likely the only guardian angel with a Yahoo e-mail account.

Julve lights up one of his trademark smiles, and raises his hands in a gesture of surrender.

"The time I spend the most is answering e-mails," he says. "I will be up til midnight answering e-mails, and I have to answer them, I have to make sure people have the proper information and know that we are here and care."

Unscrupulous Canadian recruitment agencies, says Julve, have been cashing in on the acute labour shortage in Western Canada — and Filipino workers’ desperate desire for a better life in Canada — in violation of Philippine and Canadian regulations pertaining to labour migration.

Where once these agencies preyed on women shuttled into Canada under Ottawa’s well-established live-in caregiver program, Julve says new waves of labourers, service-sector workers and even Philippine professionals are now being victimized by shady recruiters.

And in Western Canada’s boom provinces, where Filipinos are being dispatched to B.C.’s 2010 Olympics construction projects and Alberta’s oil-rush tar sands, the problems are particularly acute.

Exorbitant and illegal "placement fees" and "off-shore" recruitment are two practices Julve says he plans to crack down on.

His biggest headache, he says, are Canadian-based or Canadian-contracted agencies that continue to dodge Philippine and Canadian regulations by recruiting Filipino workers in third-party countries, notably Hong Kong, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates, where the targeted workers have often been working for years.

"Direct employers, like the big health agencies or construction firms, we don’t worry about these employers," he says, during a meeting in the boardroom of the Philippine consulate in downtown Vancouver.

"What we do worry about is these mom-and-pop agencies, these third-party agencies that will send people overseas to do recruitment. This is where the problems occur.

"But they are now slowly feeling the pinch. They know we are here now ready to throw the books at them. It will take time; we can’t work miracles."

Filipino labour activist Boni Barcia says the arrival of labour attache Bernie Julve has been a long time coming.

But Barcia, a B.C. Hospital Employee Union executive and a founding member of B.C.’s Temporary Foreign Workers Committee, suggests that it will take more than one man to stop the "abuses and exploitation" of Filipino workers in Western Canada.

"When they arrive here we don’t even know where they are or what they’re getting paid," says Barcia, who met Philippine Labour Secretary Arturo Brion when he ratified the B.C.-Philippine MOU in Vancouver earlier this year.

"I questioned why he signed this MOU," says Barcia. "And his answer was, ‘Whether we sign it or not, the people in our community will try to go abroad anyway, it is better that we have some regulations.’

"But to me, this is just cheap labour policy," adds Barcia. "This abuse is documented and it has to stop, we need to draft a policy to change the immigration law to protect these workers."

Wayne Peppard, executive director of The British Columbia and Yukon Territory Building and Construction Trades Council, an umbrella organization for B.C.’s trade unions, says the biggest challenges Filipino workers face are accessing support, learning what their rights are and exercising those rights without fear of retaliation from their employer.

He too believes the Philippine labour attache in Vancouver has a tough road ahead, suggesting Julve may have a hard time balancing the interests of the notoriously corrupt Philippine government against those of its lowly migrant workers in Canada.

"Some of those (labour) brokers have close ties with the government," says Peppard. "Remember, The Phillipines is the largest, per capita, country exporting migrant workers. The $12 billion in remittances is too important to the Phillipine economy to rock the boat."

But as Bernie Julve pores over the e-mails he receives each day — typically 30 a night — he has come to understand the abuses suffered by Filipino workers at the hands of unscrupulous recruiters and employers.

"We’ve heard about unscrupulous individuals who would recruit Filipinos but the actual employer is nowhere to be found," he says. "The border authorities call the employer to check and there is no one there and the poor worker is sent back home."

Typically, he adds, that person has borrowed and paid recruiters $7,000, $10,000, even $12,000 in placement fees for a dream job in Canada.